Wireless communication devices continue to proliferate due, in part, to technological advances that have improved both Quality of Service (QoS) and functionality. As a result, these devices have become commonplace for both personal and business use, allowing users to transmit and receive voice, text, and graphical data from various locations. The wireless networks by which these exchanges may be executed span different frequencies and ranges.
A technical specification entitled “Peer-to-Peer Technical Specification” is currently being developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance™ to define an architecture and set of protocols of a peer-to-peer (P2P) solution for Wi-Fi device-to-device connectivity. A wireless P2P network is formed by an AP-like wireless device that is called a P2P Group Owner (GO). The P2P GO builds up a P2P Group to which wireless P2P client devices can join. The P2P Clients connect to the P2P GO in the same manner that they would associate with an access point (AP) in Wi-Fi infrastructure network. The Wi-Fi Alliance P2P specification provides some functional optimizations to the basic Wi-Fi operations to address unique needs of device-to-device networking. One such optimization is related to network discovery and selection, for which a concept called layer 2 service discovery (L2SD) has been proposed. The L2SD mechanism is intended to help a searching P2P device decide whether to join a P2P Group that it has found. The L2SD mechanism is proposed to use the Generic Advertisement Service (GAS) protocol/frame exchange, as defined in the IEEE P802.11u™/D7.0, Draft Standard, June 2009. The P2P GO uses the GAS mechanism to gather information about services available in the P2P Group. The P2P GO can then provide service information compiled from all of the P2P clients in the group, to searching P2P devices to facilitate their network selection. In a P2P Group, services are typically provided by P2P Client devices that may have multiple services and the services may be dynamic, in that they are not available all the time when the P2P Client device is associated with the P2P GO. When a P2P client device changes its service offerings, it does not automatically report the updated service offering to the P2P GO.
The document entitled “Peer-to-Peer Technical Specification”, Wi-Fi Alliance, dated May 12, 2009, is incorporated herein by reference. The IEEE P802.11u™/D7.0 Draft entitled “Standard for Information Technology—Telecommunications and information exchange between systems—Local and metropolitan area networks—Specific requirements Part 11: Wireless LAN Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) specifications”, dated June 2009, is incorporated herein by reference.